Add new comment

Following on from last week’s food riots post, some wider context. The news is full of protests (Kiev, Caracas, Cairo), but to what extent is it really ‘all kicking off everywhere’ as Paul Mason claims? Just come across a pretty crude, but thought-provoking paper that tries to find out. For World Protests 2006-13, Isabel Ortiz, Sara Burke, Mohamed Berrada and Hernan Cortes scoured online media (international and national) to identify and analyse 843 protests over the period.

Demonstrators mostly address their grievances to national governments (see table, below)- also a finding of the food riots research I reviewed last week.

Not only is the number of protests increasing, but also the number of protestors. Crowd estimates suggest that 37 events had one million or more protesters; some of those may well be the largest protests in history (eg. 100 million in India in 2013, 17 million in Egypt in 2013).

‘As of 2013, as many as 63% of the protests covered in the study achieved neither their intended demands nor their expressed grievances in the short-term’. Not sure what to make of this – is a 37% success rate good or bad compared to other forms of political engagement?

‘Repression is well documented in over half of the protest episodes analyzed in the study.’ Yeah, but that may be partly because nothing guarantees you news coverage better than repression.

Which points to some wider flaws with the study – although it does discuss numbers involved, it doesn’t weight the protests accordingly in its wider analysis, which means that media visibility trumps size. It’s reasonable to assume that a few hundred demonstrators outside an IMF meeting are going to register for this study, when a few hundred peasants in rural Malawi or China are not, so the findings are likely to be heavily skewed towards global, metropolitian protests.

Call for Applications!

The Summer Institute 2015 -- Reform Communication: Leadership, Strategy and Stakeholder Alignment. In this 10-day program, participants will develop the skills required to bring about real change, leading to development results. Learn more >>

Subscribe by email

E-mail: *

Enter your email below to receive email notifications when new content is posted